War without cause gets more silly by the day

posted by Jeff | Thursday, March 6, 2003, 3:38 PM | comments: 0

You know, I do generally feel that we, as in the United States, have some moral responsibility to rid the world of any forces that could wipe out massive populations. That is the right thing to do, even though it's an entirely different matter of morality deciding who exactly qualifies as being that evil.

So right now, we hear day in and day out how Saddam is evil and he has weapons of mass destruction. OK, that would probably qualify him, sure, but we've been waiting and waiting for some kind of proof of that. The UN inspectors haven't found anything, yet we keep hearing from the Bush administration that, "Oh yeah, there's stuff there, they're just hiding it." That's like your neighbor telling the police that you've stock piled guns and drugs in your basement and them raiding you just on that. Silly, no?

Obviously I'm not the only one who sees it that way. Half of the American people agree by most polls, and our allies have no interest in getting involved.

Let's say for a minute that we do kill and destroy in Iraq. What happens if we don't find anything? Sure, we took out a "very bad man," but that man had little to no potential of doing anything to us, or even his neighbours. That goes far beyond bad PR for the US, considering the wake of destruction and the inevitable massive loss of civilian life in Iraq.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a country flat out brags that they're ready to create nuclear weapons, and we stand by and do nothing. Uh, do we really want our friends in South Korea to be instantly vaporized? I certainly don't.

The US has a disturbing history of inaction. Pakistan and India, the former Yugoslavia, the Israeli conflict... you get the idea.

Most distrubing here at home is that, for the most part, our citizens are content with just going along with things. If you ask the average person to tell you why Saddam is bad, they don't have a better answer other than, "The president said so."

So meanwhile, we have these gigantic issues to deal with like healthcare, social security, national debt, the economy, shrinking education budgets, etc. Imagine what the billions of dollars going toward this war (that at this point isn't justified) could do right here at home. Kind of depressing.